Wessex

by Charles G. Harper

In another seven miles we come to the slumberous cathedral city of Wells, in its rich vale beneath the Mendips. The population of Wells is about five thousand, and decreasing, or at the most stationary, and thus there are no unhistorical modern suburbs, and the outskirts are quite innocent of notices offering land “ripe for building.” It is true that there are two railway-stations at Wells, but they are the product of rival railway politics, rather than called into existence by necessity. I suppose the stranger would deduce a river from the place-name, but Wells knows nothing of the kind. It takes that title from the clear springs that gush forth in the neighbourhood of the cathedral, and form delightful pools at its south-eastern end, serving also to surround the fortified Bishop’s Palace with a pellucid moat. The Diocese of Wells was founded A.D. 704 by Ina, King of Wessex. Never have the rude buffetings of warfare disturbed the quiet of the place, whose history is solely ecclesiastical, and is concerned only with the long succession of Bishops and the various rebuildings of the cathedral. As we see it now, within its grassy close, the cathedral is a singularly perfect work, chiefly of the thirteenth century, rich above all other English cathedrals in delicate sculpture, and with sixty carved miserere seats that display the sweetest artistic fancy, the closest study of natural forms, and the most exquisite craftsmanship in wood-carving to be found in England. Here, too, is a curious fourteenth-century clock, still in good going order. The Bishop’s Palace, largely an Early English work, is a building beautiful enough, and looking like enough to be the scene of the legend of the Briar Rose and the Sleeping Beauty. Wells is the most cloistral of English cathedral cities. It is the one ideal cathedral city for scholar and poet that England possesses, for the rest are for the most part pushful commercial places, with electric tramways and the like manifestations of modernity. Of these things Wells knows nothing. The most startling thing I ever saw at Wells was the Bishop riding a bicycle, and he ran into me, which perhaps serves to show that, although the mitred know the straight celestial way, their terrestrial route on wheels is sometimes not so forthright as that of the mere layman. Lovely Wells, sweet with the last faint afterglow of the Middle Ages, with ancient houses, and some few comparatively modern, facing the quiet market-place, closed in at its eastern end by the great gate-houses of the cathedral precincts, the towers of that stately church peering up beyond.

The Market Place, Wells.

Wells is the nearest approach in England to the ideal Cathedral city of poets and students, and the Market-place is so little disturbed by markets that the plashing of the perennial springs which gives Wells its name is easily heard from the fountain.

From Wells we come in little more than five miles into Glastonbury, standing in the fabled Arthurian “Vale of Avalon” of the poets. I must confess that, many years ago, coming for the first time into Glastonbury, I was disappointed. I had read so deeply of Avalon—the Tennysonian Avalon of apple orchards and mystic Round Table story—that I expected too much. Glastonbury is indeed a commercial little town. Its population is less than that of Wells, but it gives the impression of being larger—perhaps because its people are out and about doing things, while the folk at Wells are engaged indoors in such meditations as befit their ecclesiastical surroundings. Really, you know, the roads into Glastonbury are quite good; and there is gas in the streets and shops, and everything that savours of the twentieth century—things that somehow sink so far into the background of it when reading Arthurian romance, that you are unreasonably inclined to resent them when coming into the town. Yet Glastonbury is rich in relics of medievalism. You may even come to your truly ancient inn here, just as did the pilgrims of old before the abbey was dissolved and the last Abbot and two of his monks were hanged, a good deal higher than Haman, on the lofty crest of Glastonbury Tor in 1539. Abbot Selwood built what is now the George Hotel in 1485 as a pilgrims’ hostel, and the ancient frontage is still in existence. The abbey ruins, which include the fine Transitional Norman remains of St. Joseph’s Chapel, are situated in lovely woodland grounds, and close by is the even more interesting Abbot’s Kitchen, massive and ecclesiastical-looking, dating from about 1420.

We may with advantage strike across country from Glastonbury to Taunton, across the interesting marshes of Sedgemoor—twenty-two miles. Glastonbury, indeed, took its original title from the Latin Insula Vitrea, a name formed by the Romans from the British “Ynys Vitrin,” and Englished by the Saxons into “Glaestingabyrig.” This was a descriptive name, applied to the still, glassy waters of the shallow inland sea which then covered the whole of Sedgemoor with the exception of a few islands. The town was one of many lake-dwellings in these waters, overlooked by the tall and steep Tor, rising strangely to a height of 500 feet. Now crowned with the fifteenth-century tower of a chapel of St. Michael, this mountainous hill is a weird object in the landscape for many miles.

We pass the boot-making village of Street, and then the village of Greinton. Westonzoyland, with its very large and very fine Perpendicular church, two and a half miles on the right, is really an Avalon, or apple island, and delightful in spring. To the north of the village was fought the Battle of Sedgemoor, July 6, 1685, and the church was afterwards used as a prison for some hundreds of captured rebels.

The flat scenery of the moor, with dykes beside the road filled with reeds and water, is varied by strangely sudden hills here and there. One of these is at Boroughbridge, a hamlet where we cross the River Parret and enter the historic Isle of Athelney. The hill, locally called “The Mump,” is crested by the ruins of a chapel of St. Michael. Here we enter a district associated with the endearing story of Alfred the Great. “He was England’s darling,” says the old Saxon Chronicle, and so he remains. It was in this selfsame Isle of Athelney that he lay hid amid the marshes, A.D., 879, after the Saxon disasters in battle with the Danes. An obelisk on a hillock records the facts.

I should like to linger in the pleasant old town of Taunton—“Taunton on the Tone,” as school primers told us to style it—but I am bound for Dunster, on the Severn Sea, and that is another twenty-two miles distant. The road to it, past Combe Florey, Crowcombe, Williton, and Washford, is Somerset at its best, in every circumstance of rustic beauty. At Washford is the ruined Cleeve Abbey, the most interesting remains of a Cistercian monastery in the West of England. The church has wholly disappeared. The interest lies in the domestic buildings and the cloisters, together with the chapter-house and refectory, all in the Early English style and very beautiful.

I choose Dunster to close this route because it is one of those rare old towns which keep their ancient manorial aspect, and neither increase nor greatly decline. It owes this distinction to the facts of being situated just off the road to anywhere at all, and to being a mile or two away from the sea, which in remote times came up to the outworks of its castle, and made the place a seaport. Dunster is a picture—nay, it is a gallery of pictures, for one meets you at every turn. There is the sleepy town of one broad street, with the castle on its wooded height in the background, and in the foreground the old Yarn Market, a remarkable timber-framed building which seems to be again awaiting the marketing of yarn. It was built, they say, in 1609, and the weather-vane, dated 1647, marks the repairs effected after the siege of the castle in 1646. That the reigning family of Dunster is named Luttrell is evident from the name of the inn, the Luttrell Arms, close by. This was in olden times a house of the Abbots of Cleeve, and still retains some semi-ecclesiastical features, including a fifteenth-century window of great size, with many elaborate oaken mullions, looking upon the courtyard. The fine priory church of Dunster, with its sweet carillons, that play a different air for every day of the week, the so-called “Nun’s House,” the old water-mill—these are all delights of Dunster. The castle, which is described as “Stancy Castle” in Thomas Hardy’s novel A Laodicean, is still the residence of the Luttrells.